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4.22 AVERAGE
4.22 AVERAGE
adventurous
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
“The crucial sentence in ‘Men Explain Things to Me’ is, ‘Credibility is a basic survival tool.’ But I was wrong that it’s a tool. You hold a tool in your own hands, and you use it yourself. What it does is up to you. Your credibility in part arises from how your society perceives people like you, and we have seen over and over again that no matter how credible some women are by supposedly objective standards, reinforced by evidence and witnesses and well-documented patterns, they will not be believed by people committed to protecting men and their privileges.”
Rebecca Solnit’s account of anxiety and erasure, and finding her voice in the face of that, resonates with me like little else I’ve read. She so carefully and thoroughly unpacks the layers of her experiences, and in doing so she takes some power over the structures that insist on taking power away from women. This is definitely a book I will read again and again.
Rebecca Solnit’s account of anxiety and erasure, and finding her voice in the face of that, resonates with me like little else I’ve read. She so carefully and thoroughly unpacks the layers of her experiences, and in doing so she takes some power over the structures that insist on taking power away from women. This is definitely a book I will read again and again.
Yes, Rebecca Solnit is a radical feminist, this book, 'a memoir', confirms that once again. At first I found it strange that someone of barely 60 years old writes a kind of memoir. Apparently, she felt compelled to outline the background to her controversial essay [b:Men Explain Things to Me|18528190|Men Explain Things to Me|Rebecca Solnit|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1393447237l/18528190._SX50_.jpg|26233826], with which she suddenly became known worldwide in 2013, and which would help lay the foundation of the #MeToo-movement.
Solnit describes in detail how, from her adolescence, she became sensitive to the harassment of women by men when she came to live in the metropolitan city of San Francisco. She speaks of a kind of permanent war, and that is hard to swallow as a male reader. But when you read her overview of the way in which (some) women are treated by (some) men, and the psychological (if not fysical) harm does to the victims, it actually seems justified. And because this pattern already exists for decades, centuries, millennia..., women have come to see the world through this predicament: “you depend on men, and what they think of you, learn to constantly check yourself in a mirror to see how you look to men, you perform for them, and this theatrical anxiety forms or deforms or stops altogether what you do and say and sometimes think. You learn to think of what you are in terms of what they want, and addressing their want becomes so ingrained in you that you lose sight of what you want, and sometimes you vanish to yourself in the art of appearing to and for others.”
Beautiful is the way in which Solnit indicates how, like so many other women, she quickly learned to 'become invisible', hence the reference in the title to her non-existence. “I became expert at fading and slipping and sneaking away, backing off, squirming out of tight situations, dodging unwanted hugs and kisses and hands, at taking up less and less space on the bus as yet another man spread into my seat, at gradually disengaging, or suddenly absenting myself. At the art of nonexistence, since existence was so perilous.”
Because that is the mechanism she puts her finger on: how men time and again succeed in not taking women seriously, and thus, for example, engage in condescending 'mansplaining'. According to Solnit, we should not minimize that: it belongs to a spectrum where at the extreme end also murder must be situated. Again I had to swallow when I read this, but she is right, putting things as sharp as that is necessary, as is – unfortunately – daily proven.
Before you get the impression that Solnit is a one-trick pony: this book also contains many more considerations than just about the female condition. I already knew her from her [b:Wanderlust: A History of Walking|78287|Wanderlust A History of Walking|Rebecca Solnit|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1170933176l/78287._SX50_.jpg|1419449] and [b:A Field Guide to Getting Lost|76479|A Field Guide to Getting Lost|Rebecca Solnit|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1422984723l/76479._SY75_.jpg|2756721] in which she offers (literally) alternative paths to approach reality, alternative with regard to western modernity. Solnit also briefly discusses this in these memoires. For instance, she links the feminist struggle with that of the Native Americans, and also draws hope from it: “I argued that we had a lot of power, a history of forgotten and undervalued victories, that while somethings were getting worse, the long view – especially if you were nonmale, or nonstraight, or nonwhite – showed some remarkable improvement in our rights and roles, and that the consequences of our acts were not knowable in advance.”
Not everything in this book is gold. In addition to the perhaps a little too one-sided focus on feminism, these memories also contain reckonings and self-justifications, as with any memoir. But fortunately, there's Solnit's unsurpassed style, which when you get used to it, is truly mesmerizing and captivates. For this she has developed a galvanizing writing process that can be called unique, in which she starts from a general statement, and then explores other views via side roads and thus arrives at a deeper experience of reality: “I believe in the irreducible and in invocation and evocation, and I am fond of sentences less like superhighways than winding paths, with the occasional scenic detour or pause to take in the view, since a footpath can traverse steep and twisting terrain that a paved road cannot. I know that sometimes what gets called digression is pulling in a passenger who fell off the boat.”
In addition, what she writes about reading and writing, and about the special form of empathy that reading entails, goes right to my heart! Absolutely recommended
Solnit describes in detail how, from her adolescence, she became sensitive to the harassment of women by men when she came to live in the metropolitan city of San Francisco. She speaks of a kind of permanent war, and that is hard to swallow as a male reader. But when you read her overview of the way in which (some) women are treated by (some) men, and the psychological (if not fysical) harm does to the victims, it actually seems justified. And because this pattern already exists for decades, centuries, millennia..., women have come to see the world through this predicament: “you depend on men, and what they think of you, learn to constantly check yourself in a mirror to see how you look to men, you perform for them, and this theatrical anxiety forms or deforms or stops altogether what you do and say and sometimes think. You learn to think of what you are in terms of what they want, and addressing their want becomes so ingrained in you that you lose sight of what you want, and sometimes you vanish to yourself in the art of appearing to and for others.”
Beautiful is the way in which Solnit indicates how, like so many other women, she quickly learned to 'become invisible', hence the reference in the title to her non-existence. “I became expert at fading and slipping and sneaking away, backing off, squirming out of tight situations, dodging unwanted hugs and kisses and hands, at taking up less and less space on the bus as yet another man spread into my seat, at gradually disengaging, or suddenly absenting myself. At the art of nonexistence, since existence was so perilous.”
Because that is the mechanism she puts her finger on: how men time and again succeed in not taking women seriously, and thus, for example, engage in condescending 'mansplaining'. According to Solnit, we should not minimize that: it belongs to a spectrum where at the extreme end also murder must be situated. Again I had to swallow when I read this, but she is right, putting things as sharp as that is necessary, as is – unfortunately – daily proven.
Before you get the impression that Solnit is a one-trick pony: this book also contains many more considerations than just about the female condition. I already knew her from her [b:Wanderlust: A History of Walking|78287|Wanderlust A History of Walking|Rebecca Solnit|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1170933176l/78287._SX50_.jpg|1419449] and [b:A Field Guide to Getting Lost|76479|A Field Guide to Getting Lost|Rebecca Solnit|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1422984723l/76479._SY75_.jpg|2756721] in which she offers (literally) alternative paths to approach reality, alternative with regard to western modernity. Solnit also briefly discusses this in these memoires. For instance, she links the feminist struggle with that of the Native Americans, and also draws hope from it: “I argued that we had a lot of power, a history of forgotten and undervalued victories, that while somethings were getting worse, the long view – especially if you were nonmale, or nonstraight, or nonwhite – showed some remarkable improvement in our rights and roles, and that the consequences of our acts were not knowable in advance.”
Not everything in this book is gold. In addition to the perhaps a little too one-sided focus on feminism, these memories also contain reckonings and self-justifications, as with any memoir. But fortunately, there's Solnit's unsurpassed style, which when you get used to it, is truly mesmerizing and captivates. For this she has developed a galvanizing writing process that can be called unique, in which she starts from a general statement, and then explores other views via side roads and thus arrives at a deeper experience of reality: “I believe in the irreducible and in invocation and evocation, and I am fond of sentences less like superhighways than winding paths, with the occasional scenic detour or pause to take in the view, since a footpath can traverse steep and twisting terrain that a paved road cannot. I know that sometimes what gets called digression is pulling in a passenger who fell off the boat.”
In addition, what she writes about reading and writing, and about the special form of empathy that reading entails, goes right to my heart! Absolutely recommended
reflective
medium-paced
emotional
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
emotional
hopeful
reflective
medium-paced
I had a decent review that disappeared but condensed, "Recollections of My Nonexistence" has a beautiful theme, but is very obviously indicative of what Solnit prefers to write and she LIKES to write as a feminist of her time, and some of the spirituality behind that feminism, will not translate well in the future as spectrums of existence become predominant.
Beautiful prose, introspective sentences, and I absolutely respect the hell out of Solnit, but sometimes second-wave feminist writers appear to come across that their one-dimensional feminism allows them specialness, and that overall mindset needs to stop! It's what Holly Hughes said during her talk of Christine Blasey-Ford as Performance Artist, now is a time of reframing and not so much disrespecting the work of past feminism, but shining new lights on different perspectives of what it means to feminist and woman.
Beautiful prose, introspective sentences, and I absolutely respect the hell out of Solnit, but sometimes second-wave feminist writers appear to come across that their one-dimensional feminism allows them specialness, and that overall mindset needs to stop! It's what Holly Hughes said during her talk of Christine Blasey-Ford as Performance Artist, now is a time of reframing and not so much disrespecting the work of past feminism, but shining new lights on different perspectives of what it means to feminist and woman.
One does not review Solnit, one imbibes her wisdom and words and feels grateful.
My favorite Solnit so far and not likely to be usurped.